05 Pleasureway Excel - Solar Panels?
Just wondering if any of you that have an Excel wide body have placed solar panels on your roof. If so, can you (or maybe already have) share your installation? I'm putting in two new AGM batteries an...
Forum Discussion
Just keep in mind small solar panels don't produce alot of DC CURRENT when in high sun. A typical 120WATT SOLAR PANEL will only produce 5-6 DC AMPS. High sun is only available for approx 5-6 hours a day for planning purposes... You will need to determine that this is enough DC CURRENT to re-charge your batteries to put back what you are using them for...
To bring a typical single battery from a 50% charge state to a 90% charge state will require around 14.4VDC with the capacity of 17-20AMPS DC current per battery if you want the battery to be re-charged to this level in a three hour time period. If you only have 5-6 hours of high sun in a day you can see how quick your may be getting into trouble keeping the battery bank charged up enough to use for long periods of time after the high sun goes away.
If you just top off a battery using a small solar panels you will eventually get depleted too low to use.
All of this takes planning on what you really want to be doing using your battery bank off the power grid...
For us we do alot of camping off the power grid and all is planned out to use our batteries (Total of 255AHs) for all of the things we want to use when off the power grid and have the battery bank depleted down to their 50% charge state (appx 12.0VDC) by 8AM each morning. This is when we fire up our 2KW generator and run our on-board smart mode converter/charger for around three hours to recharge our battery banks back up to their 90% charge state. We can only do about 12 of these 50% to 90% charge cycles before having to do a full 100% charge state which would take a good solid 12-14 hours time to complete. Thats too long to run the generator especially where generator run time restrictions are in place where you might be camping.
Having solar panels to use for us would only be used to cut back our generator run time to only have to run around one hour during the morning run. Then we could use the lower DC CURRENT from several solar panels (at least 20AMPS DC Current total) to hopefully finish the 90% required charge state so we can safely use the batteries again the next day/night run. My 255AH battery bank likes to draw around 52AMPS DC current for the first 15-20 minutes when first hit with 14.4VDC. This 52 AMPS then start tapering back as the battery bank starts taking on charge and eventually drops down to around 8AMPS or so. After the first initial high DC AMP charge has been completed then you can really benefit from the solar solar for the rest of the HIGH SUN day.
Just things to think about about setting up your solar setup for your needs...
In our case I will not want to start the next day/night run off my battery bank without them being at the 90% charge state otherwise they will be depleted early and it will get dark on me around 10PM at night haha... I want my batteries to not to get down to their 12.0VDC level until I am allowed to run my 2KW Generator then morning at 8AM to start my re-charging sequence.
Been doing this routine since 2009 and batteries are still in pretty good shape...
Roy Ken
To bring a typical single battery from a 50% charge state to a 90% charge state will require around 14.4VDC with the capacity of 17-20AMPS DC current per battery if you want the battery to be re-charged to this level in a three hour time period. If you only have 5-6 hours of high sun in a day you can see how quick your may be getting into trouble keeping the battery bank charged up enough to use for long periods of time after the high sun goes away.
If you just top off a battery using a small solar panels you will eventually get depleted too low to use.
All of this takes planning on what you really want to be doing using your battery bank off the power grid...
For us we do alot of camping off the power grid and all is planned out to use our batteries (Total of 255AHs) for all of the things we want to use when off the power grid and have the battery bank depleted down to their 50% charge state (appx 12.0VDC) by 8AM each morning. This is when we fire up our 2KW generator and run our on-board smart mode converter/charger for around three hours to recharge our battery banks back up to their 90% charge state. We can only do about 12 of these 50% to 90% charge cycles before having to do a full 100% charge state which would take a good solid 12-14 hours time to complete. Thats too long to run the generator especially where generator run time restrictions are in place where you might be camping.
Having solar panels to use for us would only be used to cut back our generator run time to only have to run around one hour during the morning run. Then we could use the lower DC CURRENT from several solar panels (at least 20AMPS DC Current total) to hopefully finish the 90% required charge state so we can safely use the batteries again the next day/night run. My 255AH battery bank likes to draw around 52AMPS DC current for the first 15-20 minutes when first hit with 14.4VDC. This 52 AMPS then start tapering back as the battery bank starts taking on charge and eventually drops down to around 8AMPS or so. After the first initial high DC AMP charge has been completed then you can really benefit from the solar solar for the rest of the HIGH SUN day.
Just things to think about about setting up your solar setup for your needs...
In our case I will not want to start the next day/night run off my battery bank without them being at the 90% charge state otherwise they will be depleted early and it will get dark on me around 10PM at night haha... I want my batteries to not to get down to their 12.0VDC level until I am allowed to run my 2KW Generator then morning at 8AM to start my re-charging sequence.
Been doing this routine since 2009 and batteries are still in pretty good shape...
Roy Ken
